The Economically Unviable Penny

            The penny is not worth the metal it is made out of. It is a coin that cost more to make than it is worth. The crux problem with the penny, in the modern economy, is that it will buy you nothing. Since nobody has the time to do a sales tax calculation in their head while waiting in line to buy their products, and even if you did the time would not be worth digging through your pockets, or purse, for exact change. No state will accept pennies in bulk and very few machines still take pennies. The only reasonable thing to do with pennies is store them in a giant glass jar and then dump them in a Coinstar, a machine that charges you 10% to spend money that you already have. The penny, at this point in time, manages to be both extremely useless and impractical, it is a Congressional gaffe that the penny is still being made. Making the penny is not cost effective, and pennies do not get used anyway.
              The penny is currently an out of date, economical blunder. As you probably know the penny is worth exactly a hundredth of a US dollar. This is all well and good, except the fact that it takes one and one half a cent more to make a penny. This means every time the U.S. Mint produces one penny it wastes one and a half cents. This may seem insignificant, however, according to the U.S. Mint almost 5 billion pennies were produced in 2011 alone. That is 50 million dollars in pennies, at a cost of 7.5 billion dollars, so in just 2011 taxpayers lost 7.5 billion dollars just to make pennies. In the scope of government this may not be a lot of money, but when every dollar is money straight from your taxpaying pocket, 7.5 billion dollars in a year is an inexplicable amount of money.
              Some misled proponents of the penny believe that the cost is irrelevant since the penny is tradition. "How can we get rid of a minted coin?" they may ask. The answer is the same way we got rid of minted coins in America before.